Seriously…....In my last post that mentioned merging the duck story with aliens surveying the earth….This would work, and can be made to work really well.

A short, short version:

The Uncle (storyteller) starts the same way, telling how he has taken his nephew under his wing when the parents went missing, and is late to the wintering resort.
The Aliens are seen here and there, probing surfaces , not finding exactly what they want.
Meanwhile, while the main duck character is stuck in the ice, an alien probes and tests different materials around him. When the alien probes the duck, he finds that the duck maxes out his meter (softness probe), so lasers him and the dragonfly out of the ice and takes them to the mothership. Unknown at this time is the fact that the aliens are looking for soft things to pad themselfves during their hard landings (duck down).
The main character ends up finding his parents, the dragonfly (mad scientist dude) helps the aliens make large dragonfly-type wings to make soft landings & the aliens become friends with the ducks & dragonfly (very thankful) and (softly) land them at their wintering resort.

Whichever story gets picked, I think it is also important to keep the story short and to the point. Nobody here wants to be still animating this thing 10 years from now, I hope. We are looking at 5-10 minutes final length, correct? So if the plot has too many points or too many characters or too many scene changes, the viewers will get confused.

For this reason I think CLICS is too complex for this format. It could work as a single episode that concentrates on some plot point, but I don’t think we can realistically cover the whole story.

I like the aliens survey story because it could be easily partitioned and shortened without loss to overall plot. The ducks story I think is less flexible, but I’m sure it can be optimized in the next level draft.

And ultimately, it will up to the writers team to come up with something both entertaining and reasonably sized, as well as manageable.

I think CLICS is a worthy exploit, and something I wish we could pull off at this stage. It probably wouldnt be a bad idea to start planning a story like that one out for next year maybe. But for the time being and the short length we are working toward we probably need to keep it simpler. CLICS has a fantastic potential, hopefully it will see the light of day someday.

Mcguiver- Another thing that I think reduces some “participation” so far is that basically the way 8.5 has dragged on and the very common complaint threads because of that——-many folks probably have stopped dropping in the forums very regularily. as it really has not been all that positive a experience of late.

That said- hopefully with some more time many more folks will chime in as this movie project is one of the most positive things to hit Carrara and these forums for 18 months. Smiles.

Ditto!

3dView - 18 January 2013 06:20 PM

Rashad—thanks for putting out a little bit of structure for the upcoming movie project and I think this can be a living document added and corrected as we move forward. It looks like right now we have a lot of consultants . Speaking of which - I notice Mcguiver—not on the list and I know his time is limited but said he could do what he could. His talents would greatly help indeed in any capacity.

I kind of suspect he will be centrally involved since the final storyline will most likely be his. Indeed its too soon to call. I will add McQuiver’s name to the list, thanks for that reminder. McQuiver has a great deal of skill that can be used in many areas of the production. He is essential, regardless of final storyline determination.

3dView - 18 January 2013 06:20 PM

Also Looking at the Artistic Direction group. (2 ) I do not have but Antara has some drawing skills ...but if we are to work on storyboards of which I would love to work on it would help if we could garnish another very good artist who can draw well. Storyboards need to be more than telling just where stuff is..ideally they can transmit things like emotion, tension, danger, atmosphere etc. Without a couple of good artists these things are hard to convey and if they are not conveyed the modelers, animators , directors have to figure things out or guess which is not a good thing. And there are going to be lots of them for a movie project.
So any one with good drawing skills——and wants to join in the Artistic Direction Group on storyboard creation ————-let us know.

I trust you to enlist any human resources you deem necessary. I personally suspect that more willing individuals will soon come forward and volunteer their skills. We will only be in the preliminary drawing stages for a short period of time, after that we will have moved on to the Carrara interpretation of the boards, and I envision many critical decisions being made at that time. You and Antara have quite the task ahead so the more the merrier. Fortunately, skill is abundant around here!

CyborgTY should be around soon to introduce himself to the group on the Technical direction side of things. He was one of the first to contact me about involvement in the project and he has a decent amount of experience with it. I feel really good about the team from a skill and general professionalism of attitude standpoint. I’m very encouraged.

Over the next day or so Mike and I will determine the final look and feel for the test project. Then once that ship is sailing we will get to the logistics of the full CCMP.

Admittedly, much of the technical discussions going on in the threads is beyond me already. Dont know much about the Carrara VM, I use Truespace typically. So I really need to get studying. Gotta be able to keep up. I feel like an out of touch congressman making policy over stem cells….not good.

Antara——Indeed no matter the story….keeping it under 15 minutes seems almost necessary .

Rashad-
I think things are moving along in a nice way ...and thanks for your organization to these projects. Getting started in anything with a community is a challenge. That said I have been encouraged by the growing number of folks who seem to want to do something positive together. There is a level of co-operation growing that although in its infancy does seem to offer great hope in actually creating something special.

rashad—- Right now as of 1/20 - there are 30 votes posted. I think we should wait for some more at least a few more days. Maybe till 50 as we once discussed.

You know the whole story/idea phase is so so important and usually a producer for instance would have been looking at a full script before making any decisions on making a movie. So we kind of made the decision making process a little more difficult for everyone. And for instance , the Mcguiver’s duck idea I expanded based on the knowledge that he had some neat models already and that it could make for a nice quick start. But that was a couple of weeks ago before we got to see some of the potential contributors and I have been impressed with the growing number of participants and their various skills indeed.

And the overall intent should always be to join the community not form opposing forces of ideas. I really don’t want to have folks not joining in on the project as its not their more “fun” to work on scheme. Its such a undertaking—we cannot dilute and expect special things to happen easily if we divide up in two.

Mcguiver and I even had a little short discussion in the forums on a possible melding the two leading stories as one and he came up with plausible story to maybe make more folks happy . Which really speaks on the creativity opportunities of which always exist I suppose but still maybe not the best way to come up a special story.

If it was not so important (the story) these things would not be as concerning but I also believe that no matter the story—-the effort on developing good characters and emotions can carry one far but with a great story these things seem to take care of themselves a little easier.

I think it was Mcguiver who said he believed that this movie project had to be something unique and make people take notice and to comment how well thought out it was. Someone else commented that it would be most likely compared to the some of the Blender open source movies. I share these comments as well. We really do not want to put in hundreds of hours of work for something that is—well average.

Despite my musings here on story——I have been pleasantly surprised by the active participation growing here and with each day seeing our possibilities grow a little more. Maybe Carrara will be the little engine that could after all.

For me , when I look at a good 3d animated movie what catches me most is the emotional impact the characters convey to the audience. This is done by story but also can be aided by the look , emotions , movements , dialogue etc of the characters. A very simple story in effect can have amazing characters and if they look good and if the audience can connect with them——in many ways they supercede the story and become a story in and of themselves.

But if you want to really hit a home run————-you really do need a compelling story that captures the audiences imagination from start to finish.

I once made a very bad 1-minute animation and when the Lotto smiles on me and I get a more capable PC, intend to re-make it.

It is set in the Victorian exploration era, narrated in the style of Baron Von Munchausen. The intrepid crew sets out in a steam-powered river boat to explore Mars.

The narration went something like this-

Donning our protective clothing against the poisonous vapors rumored to be found in Space, we set out at dawn, intending to reach the Red Planet by sunset, so as not to be burned to a crisp by the Fierce Tropical Sun said to exist in those parts.

We had to complete our journey before that dastardly Newton’s Law was passed by Parliament, which I predict will make leaving this Planet impossible.

Passing close by to the Moon, we found it was actually not made of green cheese, but a rather pleasant Stilton.

The journey took longer than expected - three days and fifteen nights - time being measured differently in Space, as I later explained to Mr. Einstein. It was all relative. Etc, etc. - it ends with him waking up and finding his coffee gone quite cold:)

Alien ducks is a cool idea, and one that lends itself very well to humor. I think however that at this point in time we don’t need to try to make every possible movie at once. If this year we make a space themed movie them next year maybe we will do ducks. Or if we do duck this year then we can do robots and outer space next year.

Put it this way. To my mind the only real reason to set the ducks in space is if it will provide some sort of increased interest for the storyline, in that setting it in space results in a better story than setting it on Earth.

This could well be possible, so I dont want to say setting ducks in space is a bad idea…its probably a fantastic idea. It just needs to make sense logically.

Slowly, we are getting more votes. But to avoid losing too much momentum I will discuss with Mike closing the voting in the next few days. It’s about time to start getting some real work done. Fun Fun.